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Server disconnections and "out of bounds"

K, +6 whinge item on !

Tonight Ghallanda has been disconnecting myself and 3 others I know of, every few minutes we are frozen in place, we can still see what others are doing around us, we can still communicate in guild chat / world chat etc, but cannot move, !!!

This is becoming very very very very VERY frustrating, especially when your burning a 30% XP pot and you can't actually complete anything because you keep being semi-disconnected . . . . so what may I ask turbine is going on ?

And something I have wished to ask about for a long time : Why is it that NPC's / enemies can charge up and start beating you to death, but as soon as you hit them back, you cannot, they get the little white bubble over their head which signifies "out of bounds" and they drift off, how come they are not "out of bounds" when we the players are getting hurt by them, but they are when you start to hit them back ?

If you do nothing, they WILL beat you to death, they do not stop at any point until you try to hit them back . . . . . . again turbine , what is the go with this ?

Since the last update the game has been anything BUT enjoyable, the above issues combined with constant lag which was not there before and the incredible ability of the game to screw you over at every opportunity, are the devs hitting the "you lose" button or something ? it certainly seems that way.

All of these issues of course will not occur when you don't have a pot burning . .. . . just like the enemy isn't out of bounds till you fight back.

I was in that party, on easter weekend, on a 7th life character, burning a 30% xp pot, on a 20% bonus xp weekend, and in the end.... i ragequit.

Now that's saying something, i ended up putting myself on a ddo ban for 12 hours to relax after that immensely stressful set of dc's.

I understand that without massive amounts of specific information (and even then......) there is nothing that can be done about it, but mein gott! ragequitting on a 20% bonus weekend has to speak to the level of frustration it caused!

To quote a character from Monty Python's Holy Grail,,,, "i got better"

Tonight Ghallanda has been disconnecting myself and 3 others I know of, every few minutes we are frozen in place, we can still see what others are doing around us, we can still communicate in guild chat / world chat etc, but cannot move, !!!

This is becoming very very very very VERY frustrating, especially when your burning a 30% XP pot and you can't actually complete anything because you keep being semi-disconnected . . . . so what may I ask turbine is going on ?

And something I have wished to ask about for a long time : Why is it that NPC's / enemies can charge up and start beating you to death, but as soon as you hit them back, you cannot, they get the little white bubble over their head which signifies "out of bounds" and they drift off, how come they are not "out of bounds" when we the players are getting hurt by them, but they are when you start to hit them back ?

If you do nothing, they WILL beat you to death, they do not stop at any point until you try to hit them back . . . . . . again turbine , what is the go with this ?

Since the last update the game has been anything BUT enjoyable, the above issues combined with constant lag which was not there before and the incredible ability of the game to screw you over at every opportunity, are the devs hitting the "you lose" button or something ? it certainly seems that way.

All of these issues of course will not occur when you don't have a pot burning . .. . . just like the enemy isn't out of bounds till you fight back.

Ok, here is a possible explanation.

The stuff you play over uses TCP/IP as a communications protocol. This communications system has several slots where information is passed back and forth to your PC from the server. There are lots of communication slots that exist in TCP/IP, and there are two basic types of communication. You guild chat / world chat / party chat is on one socket, voice communications (I can almosr guarantee you) is on another, and the combat / aventure system is on one or more additional slots.

Plus, the program, and the server, use process threads to not only handle communications, but also dungon instances, and so on. A thread is like a mini-program inside of a program that runs of on its own accord (this is a really big oversimplication). So while you're playing, you probably have a communications slot and thread dedicated to your chat, another slot and thread dedicated to your voice chart, and the potential for a whole bunch of slots and threads to be allocated to your dungeon.

Likewise, Turbine probably has a whole bunch of servers in a room somewhere that run different adventures and dungeon instances. So when you enter a dungeon, a program is started on a PC that kicks off a bunch of mini-programs that handle stuff like player positioning, mob attacks, and so on.

Now, add into the mix that if you have one mini program that handles where your character is in a dungeon, and another mini program that communicates to your PC, these two have to talk. It is VERY possible that in the mids of these communications, that specific PC can have a communications problem that may halt communications to your PC, but the thread (mini program) that handles the mobs doesn't know you're not talking. There are time-outs and stuff that occur on communications threads that allow you to keep running even though you lose connection, and then quickly reconnect, so that you don't have to restart DDO everytime you lokse communications. Thus, while the server thinks you're "frozen in place" the mobs mini-program continue's to rend the living flesh from your character, with you being in abstentia.

Up until the communications thread tells everyone, "hey, he's really disconnected!" Then, well, I dunno what really happens. But I'm sure the application compensates for that.

Given that your chat worked fine, what most likely happened is that whatever PC you were on either had a bad connection to the communications backbone, or had a sudden spike in processor utilization, and your dungeon instance came to a grinding halt.

But I'm just taking a stab at how things are what actually happened...

Given the complexity of an application like DDO, and the nature of wide-area communications protocols, the Devs are unlikely to fix this. Really, the only solution is to boot your party out of a dungeon when your communications has a hiccup...and I can almost guarantee you would NOT like what happens with that!

Most real-time gaming systems require a communications that is fairly robust, and free of interruptions. Unfortunately, unless you're playing on a local LAN with a backup, that'll never happen. There are lots of routers, bridges, and switches between you and the DDO servers. So, a certain amount of delay and fault -tolerance has to be built into the client and server interation to provide a reasonably pleasent player experience.

Unfortunately, that sometimes means that mobs get to rend the flesh off your hapless toon when your communications pipe goes into the c**pper.

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